Legos For The Digital Age - The Games I've Played

Yup, Minecraft.

I finally got around to playing it, and I TOTALLY get the hype now. It's a nice flow of a game where you can build just about whatever you want, dig to wherever you want, and you find yourself going, "I'll just do one more thing. . ." enough times in a row that you find yourself with a two story mansion lit by lava falls, a herd of cattle, and a pet dog and it's three in the morning and you're trying to convince yourself that you can do just 'one more thing'.

For a game that has no real game, I get the addiction to it.

The thing about this game is that you get lost doing things. While you're doing one thing, thirty other things start to crop up that you also want to do. You start to work on digging out diamonds but then you find a lava tube that opens up to a huge cave that leads into a bigger deposit of minerals that you have to explore. About two hours later you're finally back to where you started trying to dig out some more diamonds.

There is the MINOR and it is a truly minor thing, that the maps are somewhat restrictive. The maps on the ps3 version are small. They are small enough that once I knew where I was going, I could navigate from any corner of my world back to my base in one day cycle avoiding any darkness and monster spawns. Although they are small, you get that small little thing where you have BILLIONS, if not trillions, of maps to play on. Sure, you might know one map like the back of your hand, but just start another random map and hold on because it's going to be a different world. It's a bit frustrating when one map doesn't have what you need (like an end portal) but there's enough maps out there that you can find a variety of things no matter what you want to do.

Then there is creative mode. I'm starting to see where people just sit down and build replicas of buildings, or massive towns, and how you can start doing that. You start with a small little shed, that you call home, and in no time flat you're transforming the land, strip mining entire mountains, and morphing the world into what you want/need. I had to walk away from this game before I hit 100% on the trophies for this very reason. I knew that if I kept playing I would just start going full lego mode and building cathedrals with stained glass windows and other stupid things. I could dump some serious hours into this digital form of legos and not even blink an eye.

Yes, the graphics are horrible.
Yes, there is NO plot line.
But oh, is there still a game in the pixilated square world that is Minecraft. If you have ever spent any time with legos and actually enjoyed it you will love Minecraft for the exact same "I can build anything and destroy anything" feeling.